Library of Congress, Confederate States of America Records (Pickett Papers), MSS16550, Reel 9, frames 486–496 https://www.loc.gov/collections/confederate-states-of-america-records/about-this-collection/
ICYMI, the last one I cracked: Barney to Mallory, 1863
The Confederate government's propaganda agent in Europe had a $25,000 secret service fund for buying favorable coverage in the European press. In the autumn of 1863 his mail was captured at sea and printed in the Northern papers. His next two despatches to Richmond contain passages in a symbol cipher, and he says on the page that the key belongs to his brother.
No key to this particular system survives in any document I have found. I reconstructed the alphabet from the cipher text itself. A translation his brother made in 1864 turned up afterwards, and it confirms the first passage outright.
What he thought was worth hiding:
>My letter intercepted. Good advertisement. Bought L'Opinion Nationale, and other enemies since.
He is telling his own government that having his correspondence splashed across the Northern press did him a favor, and that he has been buying up Paris newspapers that used to attack him. The following month he asks for more money.
He did not know that his recall had already been signed in Richmond and was crossing the Atlantic while he wrote.
After the Barney letter I went through the rest of the Confederate cipher traffic in the same published record, and got stuck on a small anomaly. One despatch has a group the Official Records editors marked as untranslated, and two separate published sources give different readings for it. If two editors are working from the same group, that disagreement wants explaining, so the printed text was not the end of the story and the manuscripts were worth looking at.
That took me to the Pickett Papers at the Library of Congress, the captured Confederate State Department archive, on microfilm. The group turned out to be a scribe's problem rather than a cipher problem. A clear copy of the same despatch survives a few reels away with the word simply written out, and the printed reading is wrong.
While working through those reels I was skimming a contact sheet of another one for something unrelated, and two frames went past covered in geometric symbols instead of handwriting.
Edwin De Leon was sent to Europe in 1862 to manage Confederate propaganda, with a $25,000 secret service fund for placing material in the European press. He wrote numbered despatches to Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of State. Nos. 1 through 12 are in plain text.
In the autumn of 1863 his mail was taken. The bag went overboard from the blockade runner R. E. Lee as she was captured off Wilmington, and washed ashore. Seward forwarded the letters to Charles Francis Adams in London and had them published (Seward to Adams, No. 767, 23 November 1863). The captured letters are printed in full here:
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1863p1/d675
Despatch No. 13, written from Paris on 23 December 1863, is the first he ever enciphered. He announces it in the middle of the page, in plain English:
>I will add in cipher one item (My Brother has the Key.)
And again in a postscript: I use my Brother's cipher.
It is not the State Department's cipher. The packet issued to him before he sailed survives at reel 9, and holds a Rochford grille and four Vigenère tables. There is no symbol alphabet in it. What he used was a private alphabet held by his brother, Thomas Cooper DeLeon, in Richmond.
The marks are geometric shapes and arabic numerals: dotted boxes open on different sides, a trident, a caret with a dot, phi and psi, and the digits 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 used as ciphertext. Three passages survive across two despatches, around 140 marks of distinct text. He re-copied the first passage into the second despatch, so the raw count on the film is higher.
Two things made it tractable. One cipher word repeats its symbols in a distinctive pattern, and searching an English word list for words of the same length and shape returns essentially one candidate: OPINION. That fixed four letters. Separately, a statistical attack that scores candidate alphabets on how English-like the resulting text looks was run without being given that result, and recovered most of the same alphabet on its own. Anchoring the letters both approaches agreed on and searching the remainder produced continuous English.
Italics mark words he wrote in plain English inside the cipher stream.
1) No. 13, Paris, 23 December 1863
>MY LETER INTERCPTD. GOOD ADVERTISMNT. BOT OPINION NATIONAL and OTER ENEMI SINCE
Read as: My letter intercepted. Good advertisement. Bought L'Opinion Nationale, and other enemies since.
L'Opinion Nationale was a Paris daily. He is describing the publication of his own captured correspondence as useful advertising, and reporting a purchase.
Note the plural. He bought L'Opinion Nationale, and other enemies since: papers that had been hostile and were no longer.
What "bought" covers is worth being careful about, because the cipher does not say. His fund was for placing Confederate material in the European press, which in practice meant subsidies, retainers to editors and paid insertions. Acquiring the titles themselves would have cost far more than the $25,000 he had for the whole of Europe. The natural reading is that he bought their support rather than the papers, but the word in the cipher is simply BOT, and I would not push it further than that.
2) No. 14, Paris, 20 January 1864, first passage
>MOR MONY SHUD B SPENT THIS WAY
Read as: More money should be spent this way. Having just told Richmond he bought one paper, he is asking for the budget to buy more.
3) No. 14, second passage
>SUM IS NEDED TO CARY OUT PLEDGES and to PREVNT REACTION. For this last 500 MORE [ … ]
That passage reads cleanly down to PREVNT REACTION. For this last 500 is written in plain English on the page. After it come a handful of marks that do not fully resolve, shown in brackets above, and his brother renders the whole ending as "additional in fifties would answer". Reading that as a request for the balance in fifty-pound notes is my inference from his wording.
The short forms are his, not transcription errors. Counting across all three passages there are twenty deletions and no insertions anywhere. He only ever removes letters.
He writes one symbol per sound, so BOUGHT is BOT and SHOULD is SHUD. He writes doubled letters once, so LETTER is LETER and CARRY is CARY, except where the collapse would produce another word: GOOD stays GOOD, because GOD is a word. Unstressed vowels are what he drops, and E goes most often.
Two contemporary translations survive, both by the brother, and both from February 1864. He had the alphabet and produced a reading when the State Department asked him for one.
The first is at reel 9 frame 87, repeated at reel 33 frame 593, from Thomas Cooper DeLeon to W. J. Bromwell, chief clerk of the State Department, dated 12 February 1864 and endorsed Literal translation. The second, at reel 33 frame 595 and dated 22 February 1864, is written against the cipher.
What he did not write down anywhere is the alphabet. Neither document gives a single symbol-to-letter mapping. Nor is either a strict letter-by-letter decipherment. He renders the second passage as More funds ought to be spent in this manner, where the cipher reads MOR MONY SHUD B SPENT THIS WAY, and the third as there is needed enough to meet existing pledges against SUM IS NEDED TO CARY OUT PLEDGES. He says as much himself: I enclose translation as near as I can make it. It reads as a man working from the key and his own familiarity with his brother's shorthand, giving the sense rather than the letters.
That matters for what can be claimed. For the first passage his translation is a genuine independent check, and it matches. For the two shorter passages, four rarely-used symbols could not be settled from the cipher text alone, and his reading is what settled them. Eighteen commonly-used symbols came from the cipher text and none of them moved.
Worth noting what the existence of those translations means at all. Thomas Cooper DeLeon (his brother back home) worked in the Navy Department. When No. 13 arrived in Richmond, the State Department's chief clerk had to write to another department and ask what it said.
Despatch No. 15, Paris, 3 February 1864, carries no cipher, and explains itself:
>Your Despatch No. 5 of December 9th has been duly received, and I cheerfully accept the withdrawal of a commission I have never exhibited, of a title I have never used, and of a salary which I have never accepted.
That is his recall, signed by Benjamin on 9 December 1863 and carried to Paris by ship. The two enciphered dispatches are four weeks apart. Two dispatches, three passages, and that is the whole of it.
Note: To be clear, the contents of these dispatches were never "lost". The brother's translations were filed with them and have been in the archive throughout. What was lost is the alphabet and the exact solution to the cipher: nobody wrote it down, and it appears in no surviving document I have located. That is what has been reconstructed, and unlike the translations it applies to anything else that turns up with the same cipher key.
The manuscripts are Library of Congress, Confederate States of America Records (the Pickett Papers), MSS16550: reel 9 frames 87, 97, 102, 104 and 106, and reel 33 frames 592 to 595. The collection is digitized and free:
https://www.loc.gov/collections/confederate-states-of-america-records/about-this-collection/
I am working towards publishing this, together with some other Civil War cipher results, and I am happy to share the documents I have catalogued, the full glyph table, the transcriptions and the working notes with anyone who wants them. If you would like to check the work, or have leads towards similar historical ciphers, please get in touch. Thank you for reading!
ICYMI, the last one I cracked: Barney to Mallory, 1863
The Confederate government's propaganda agent in Europe had a $25,000 secret service fund for buying favorable coverage in the European press. In the autumn of 1863 his mail was captured at sea and printed in the Northern papers. His next two despatches to Richmond contain passages in a symbol cipher, and he says on the page that the key belongs to his brother.
No key to this particular system survives in any document I have found. I reconstructed the alphabet from the cipher text itself. A translation his brother made in 1864 turned up afterwards, and it confirms the first passage outright.
What he thought was worth hiding:
>My letter intercepted. Good advertisement. Bought L'Opinion Nationale, and other enemies since.
He is telling his own government that having his correspondence splashed across the Northern press did him a favor, and that he has been buying up Paris newspapers that used to attack him. The following month he asks for more money.
He did not know that his recall had already been signed in Richmond and was crossing the Atlantic while he wrote.
After the Barney letter I went through the rest of the Confederate cipher traffic in the same published record, and got stuck on a small anomaly. One despatch has a group the Official Records editors marked as untranslated, and two separate published sources give different readings for it. If two editors are working from the same group, that disagreement wants explaining, so the printed text was not the end of the story and the manuscripts were worth looking at.
That took me to the Pickett Papers at the Library of Congress, the captured Confederate State Department archive, on microfilm. The group turned out to be a scribe's problem rather than a cipher problem. A clear copy of the same despatch survives a few reels away with the word simply written out, and the printed reading is wrong.
While working through those reels I was skimming a contact sheet of another one for something unrelated, and two frames went past covered in geometric symbols instead of handwriting.
Edwin De Leon was sent to Europe in 1862 to manage Confederate propaganda, with a $25,000 secret service fund for placing material in the European press. He wrote numbered despatches to Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of State. Nos. 1 through 12 are in plain text.
In the autumn of 1863 his mail was taken. The bag went overboard from the blockade runner R. E. Lee as she was captured off Wilmington, and washed ashore. Seward forwarded the letters to Charles Francis Adams in London and had them published (Seward to Adams, No. 767, 23 November 1863). The captured letters are printed in full here:
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1863p1/d675
Despatch No. 13, written from Paris on 23 December 1863, is the first he ever enciphered. He announces it in the middle of the page, in plain English:
>I will add in cipher one item (My Brother has the Key.)
And again in a postscript: I use my Brother's cipher.
It is not the State Department's cipher. The packet issued to him before he sailed survives at reel 9, and holds a Rochford grille and four Vigenère tables. There is no symbol alphabet in it. What he used was a private alphabet held by his brother, Thomas Cooper DeLeon, in Richmond.
The marks are geometric shapes and arabic numerals: dotted boxes open on different sides, a trident, a caret with a dot, phi and psi, and the digits 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 used as ciphertext. Three passages survive across two despatches, around 140 marks of distinct text. He re-copied the first passage into the second despatch, so the raw count on the film is higher.
Two things made it tractable. One cipher word repeats its symbols in a distinctive pattern, and searching an English word list for words of the same length and shape returns essentially one candidate: OPINION. That fixed four letters. Separately, a statistical attack that scores candidate alphabets on how English-like the resulting text looks was run without being given that result, and recovered most of the same alphabet on its own. Anchoring the letters both approaches agreed on and searching the remainder produced continuous English.
Italics mark words he wrote in plain English inside the cipher stream.
1) No. 13, Paris, 23 December 1863
>MY LETER INTERCPTD. GOOD ADVERTISMNT. BOT OPINION NATIONAL and OTER ENEMI SINCE
Read as: My letter intercepted. Good advertisement. Bought L'Opinion Nationale, and other enemies since.
L'Opinion Nationale was a Paris daily. He is describing the publication of his own captured correspondence as useful advertising, and reporting a purchase.
Note the plural. He bought L'Opinion Nationale, and other enemies since: papers that had been hostile and were no longer.
What "bought" covers is worth being careful about, because the cipher does not say. His fund was for placing Confederate material in the European press, which in practice meant subsidies, retainers to editors and paid insertions. Acquiring the titles themselves would have cost far more than the $25,000 he had for the whole of Europe. The natural reading is that he bought their support rather than the papers, but the word in the cipher is simply BOT, and I would not push it further than that.
2) No. 14, Paris, 20 January 1864, first passage
>MOR MONY SHUD B SPENT THIS WAY
Read as: More money should be spent this way. Having just told Richmond he bought one paper, he is asking for the budget to buy more.
3) No. 14, second passage
>SUM IS NEDED TO CARY OUT PLEDGES and to PREVNT REACTION. For this last 500 MORE [ … ]
That passage reads cleanly down to PREVNT REACTION. For this last 500 is written in plain English on the page. After it come a handful of marks that do not fully resolve, shown in brackets above, and his brother renders the whole ending as "additional in fifties would answer". Reading that as a request for the balance in fifty-pound notes is my inference from his wording.
The short forms are his, not transcription errors. Counting across all three passages there are twenty deletions and no insertions anywhere. He only ever removes letters.
He writes one symbol per sound, so BOUGHT is BOT and SHOULD is SHUD. He writes doubled letters once, so LETTER is LETER and CARRY is CARY, except where the collapse would produce another word: GOOD stays GOOD, because GOD is a word. Unstressed vowels are what he drops, and E goes most often.
Two contemporary translations survive, both by the brother, and both from February 1864. He had the alphabet and produced a reading when the State Department asked him for one.
The first is at reel 9 frame 87, repeated at reel 33 frame 593, from Thomas Cooper DeLeon to W. J. Bromwell, chief clerk of the State Department, dated 12 February 1864 and endorsed Literal translation. The second, at reel 33 frame 595 and dated 22 February 1864, is written against the cipher.
What he did not write down anywhere is the alphabet. Neither document gives a single symbol-to-letter mapping. Nor is either a strict letter-by-letter decipherment. He renders the second passage as More funds ought to be spent in this manner, where the cipher reads MOR MONY SHUD B SPENT THIS WAY, and the third as there is needed enough to meet existing pledges against SUM IS NEDED TO CARY OUT PLEDGES. He says as much himself: I enclose translation as near as I can make it. It reads as a man working from the key and his own familiarity with his brother's shorthand, giving the sense rather than the letters.
That matters for what can be claimed. For the first passage his translation is a genuine independent check, and it matches. For the two shorter passages, four rarely-used symbols could not be settled from the cipher text alone, and his reading is what settled them. Eighteen commonly-used symbols came from the cipher text and none of them moved.
Worth noting what the existence of those translations means at all. Thomas Cooper DeLeon (his brother back home) worked in the Navy Department. When No. 13 arrived in Richmond, the State Department's chief clerk had to write to another department and ask what it said.
Despatch No. 15, Paris, 3 February 1864, carries no cipher, and explains itself:
>Your Despatch No. 5 of December 9th has been duly received, and I cheerfully accept the withdrawal of a commission I have never exhibited, of a title I have never used, and of a salary which I have never accepted.
That is his recall, signed by Benjamin on 9 December 1863 and carried to Paris by ship. The two enciphered dispatches are four weeks apart. Two dispatches, three passages, and that is the whole of it.
Note: To be clear, the contents of these dispatches were never "lost". The brother's translations were filed with them and have been in the archive throughout. What was lost is the alphabet and the exact solution to the cipher: nobody wrote it down, and it appears in no surviving document I have located. That is what has been reconstructed, and unlike the translations it applies to anything else that turns up with the same cipher key.
The manuscripts are Library of Congress, Confederate States of America Records (the Pickett Papers), MSS16550: reel 9 frames 87, 97, 102, 104 and 106, and reel 33 frames 592 to 595. The collection is digitized and free:
https://www.loc.gov/collections/confederate-states-of-america-records/about-this-collection/
I am working towards publishing this, together with some other Civil War cipher results, and I am happy to share the documents I have catalogued, the full glyph table, the transcriptions and the working notes with anyone who wants them. If you would like to check the work, or have leads towards similar historical ciphers, please get in touch. Thank you for reading!
Edit - New cipher: Confederate propaganda agent in Paris
I found what appears to be the dictionary to solve a coded Confederate Navy dispatch sent from the captured CSS Harriet Lane at Galveston in March 1863.
The matching book is an 1850 printing of Webster’s Primary School Dictionary, found this by checking all available pre-1863 editions that are digitized online.
Using one rule {printed page, column, and numbered displayed headword} 17 of the letter’s 18 coordinates return coherent words with no offsets or case-by-case adjustments. The only repeated coordinate returns the same word both times. A clear report written by the same officer ten days earlier independently discusses the same ship, guns, battery, harbor obstruction, egress, officers, and proposal to send her abroad.
I have not found a previously published plaintext. A 2012 CivilWarTalk thread identified the general cipher type and found the earlier report, but did not identify the book.
Lt. Joseph N. Barney was commanding the Harriet Lane, a United States revenue cutter and Union warship captured by Confederate forces during the Battle of Galveston on 1 January 1863.
On 19 March 1863, Barney sent Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory a report in which eighteen operational words were replaced by three-number coordinates. The report was later printed (still in cipher) in the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, Series I, volume 20, page 805: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth192855/m1/826/
Barney’s own note supplies the key instruction: “The second or middle figure indicates the column, 1st, 2d, or 3d.”
He had also written Mallory on 23 February that he was sending “a copy of Webster’s Dictionary for the purpose designated in your letter of instructions.” Confederate officers are known to have used page-column-word dictionary codes; Raphael Semmes described the same general scheme in an 1861 Navy letter: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth192836/m1/644/
Each coordinate means: printed page — column — numbered displayed headword
For example, 177-2-16 means:
• Open the dictionary to printed page 177.
• Use column 2, the middle column.
• Count the separately displayed headwords from the top.
• The 16th displayed headword is PLACE.
So “General Magruder proposed to (177)-2-16- the…” becomes “General Magruder proposed to PLACE the…”
There is also another useful internal check that strengthens our odds/theory/conjecture that this is in fact the dictionary they used: The coordinate 10-1-12 (“ABROAD”) appears twice once in the main letter and once in the postscript.
The “what if we’re overfitting against a dictionary copy that’s quite close but not the exact one” case isn’t that big of a concern since print page 10, left column, 12th displayed headword is ABROAD both times and makes complete sense in both contexts of this letter (if it wasn’t the case, the misfit would be more self-evident, right?)
The complete dictionary is here: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044086661170
177-2-16 = PLACE
216-1-15 = SHIP
113-3-85 = unresolved source anomaly
29-3-36 = BATTERY
23-3-29 = ASHORE
163-1-34 = OBSTRUCTION
85-3-14 = EGRESS
115-1-7 = HARBOR
262-3-22 = VESSEL
54-2-33 = COMMISSION
215-2-26 = SHE
149-1-30 = MAT
156-1-8 = MORASS
163-3-40 = OFFICER
213-2-21 = SENT
10-1-12 = ABROAD
150-3-12 = MEN
10-1-12 = ABROAD again
“In my last of 9th instant by Lieutenant Warley I reported that General Magruder proposed to PLACE the SHIP [GUN/GUNS] in BATTERY ASHORE. I am officially informed that OBSTRUCTION will prevent EGRESS from HARBOR. As my previous suggestions are thus defeated, I presume the VESSEL will not be kept in COMMISSION, SHE being entirely useless. I beg leave respectfully to suggest that being so near MAT-a-MORASS the OFFICER might be SENT ABROAD.
P.S.—What shall be done with the MEN sent from Richmond in case the above suggestion is carried out? Some might, if practicable, be sent ABROAD.”
In ordinary wording, the operational point is straightforward: Magruder wanted the ship’s guns placed in a shore battery; harbor obstructions prevented the vessel’s exit; the ship was therefore useless in commission; and Barney suggested sending her officers and perhaps some of her men abroad.
The cipher explicitly refers back to Barney’s report of 9 March, carried by Lt. Warley. That earlier report survives in clear: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth192854/m1/876/
It discusses the Harriet Lane, her guns and battery, whether harbor obstructions would prevent her egress, her officers and men, and the possibility of sending her abroad. It is not a plaintext copy of the 19 March cipher, but it independently confirms the decoded story and strongly supports the missing GUN/GUNS position.
The surviving Official Records printing clearly reads 113-3-85, but page 113’s third column has only 35 displayed entries. Entry 8 is GUN. The clear 9 March report repeatedly discusses the ship’s guns and battery, so GUN/GUNS is strongly supported—but I am not counting it among the 17 mechanically resolved coordinates.
My best guess is that an original 8 or 8s became 85 somewhere during copying or typesetting. Multiple public copies preserve the same printed 85, so Barney’s original or a contemporary retained copy is needed to settle it. His undigitized letterbook is catalogued as NARA RG 45, Entry I-18 644, NAID 1848146: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1848146
The mechanical output MAT + the clear letter “a” + MORASS joins as MATAMORASS. This appears to be a phonetic construction for Matamoras/Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Texas. An 1850 spelling book divides the name as MAT A MO RAS, and an 1851 geography prints MAT-A-MO-RAS: https://archive.org/details/primaryschoolspe00swanrich/page/n82/mode/1up and https://archive.org/details/poeticalgeograph00vanwrich/page/n30/mode/1up
(Side note: I love this so much because who doesn’t love a lil-silly-poem-in-a-centuries-old-book detour about a now obscure place that is somehow super relevant in cracking this centuries old cipher, all because the folks at Google and Harvard and a gazillion other archivists nerds decided it was worth saving)
I regard that place-name as a persuasive interpretation of two keyed fragments plus the printed letter “a,” not as another independently keyed word.
The earlier discussion that got partway there is here: https://civilwartalk.com/threads/confederate-naval-cipher.78858/
——————————————————————————————
As far as I have been able to determine, this is the first public reading of the complete report since it appeared in cipher in the Official Records.
I would be very interested in corrections or similar ciphers, thank you for reading!
Edit - New Post: Confederate propaganda agent in Paris
I found what appears to be the dictionary to solve a coded Confederate Navy dispatch sent from the captured CSS Harriet Lane at Galveston in March 1863.
The matching book is an 1850 printing of Webster’s Primary School Dictionary, found this by checking all available pre-1863 editions that are digitized online.
Using one rule {printed page, column, and numbered displayed headword} 17 of the letter’s 18 coordinates return coherent words with no offsets or case-by-case adjustments. The only repeated coordinate returns the same word both times. A clear report written by the same officer ten days earlier independently discusses the same ship, guns, battery, harbor obstruction, egress, officers, and proposal to send her abroad.
I have not found a previously published plaintext. A 2012 CivilWarTalk thread identified the general cipher type and found the earlier report, but did not identify the book.
Lt. Joseph N. Barney was commanding the Harriet Lane, a United States revenue cutter and Union warship captured by Confederate forces during the Battle of Galveston on 1 January 1863.
On 19 March 1863, Barney sent Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory a report in which eighteen operational words were replaced by three-number coordinates. The report was later printed (still in cipher) in the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, Series I, volume 20, page 805: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth192855/m1/826/
Barney’s own note supplies the key instruction: “The second or middle figure indicates the column, 1st, 2d, or 3d.”
He had also written Mallory on 23 February that he was sending “a copy of Webster’s Dictionary for the purpose designated in your letter of instructions.” Confederate officers are known to have used page-column-word dictionary codes; Raphael Semmes described the same general scheme in an 1861 Navy letter: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth192836/m1/644/
Each coordinate means: printed page — column — numbered displayed headword
For example, 177-2-16 means:
• Open the dictionary to printed page 177.
• Use column 2, the middle column.
• Count the separately displayed headwords from the top.
• The 16th displayed headword is PLACE.
So “General Magruder proposed to (177)-2-16- the…” becomes “General Magruder proposed to PLACE the…”
There is also another useful internal check that strengthens our odds/theory/conjecture that this is in fact the dictionary they used: The coordinate 10-1-12 (“ABROAD”) appears twice once in the main letter and once in the postscript.
The “what if we’re overfitting against a dictionary copy that’s quite close but not the exact one” case isn’t that big of a concern since print page 10, left column, 12th displayed headword is ABROAD both times and makes complete sense in both contexts of this letter (if it wasn’t the case, the misfit would be more self-evident, right?)
The complete dictionary is here: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044086661170
177-2-16 = PLACE
216-1-15 = SHIP
113-3-85 = unresolved source anomaly
29-3-36 = BATTERY
23-3-29 = ASHORE
163-1-34 = OBSTRUCTION
85-3-14 = EGRESS
115-1-7 = HARBOR
262-3-22 = VESSEL
54-2-33 = COMMISSION
215-2-26 = SHE
149-1-30 = MAT
156-1-8 = MORASS
163-3-40 = OFFICER
213-2-21 = SENT
10-1-12 = ABROAD
150-3-12 = MEN
10-1-12 = ABROAD again
“In my last of 9th instant by Lieutenant Warley I reported that General Magruder proposed to PLACE the SHIP [GUN/GUNS] in BATTERY ASHORE. I am officially informed that OBSTRUCTION will prevent EGRESS from HARBOR. As my previous suggestions are thus defeated, I presume the VESSEL will not be kept in COMMISSION, SHE being entirely useless. I beg leave respectfully to suggest that being so near MAT-a-MORASS the OFFICER might be SENT ABROAD.
P.S.—What shall be done with the MEN sent from Richmond in case the above suggestion is carried out? Some might, if practicable, be sent ABROAD.”
In ordinary wording, the operational point is straightforward: Magruder wanted the ship’s guns placed in a shore battery; harbor obstructions prevented the vessel’s exit; the ship was therefore useless in commission; and Barney suggested sending her officers and perhaps some of her men abroad.
The cipher explicitly refers back to Barney’s report of 9 March, carried by Lt. Warley. That earlier report survives in clear: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth192854/m1/876/
It discusses the Harriet Lane, her guns and battery, whether harbor obstructions would prevent her egress, her officers and men, and the possibility of sending her abroad. It is not a plaintext copy of the 19 March cipher, but it independently confirms the decoded story and strongly supports the missing GUN/GUNS position.
The surviving Official Records printing clearly reads 113-3-85, but page 113’s third column has only 35 displayed entries. Entry 8 is GUN. The clear 9 March report repeatedly discusses the ship’s guns and battery, so GUN/GUNS is strongly supported—but I am not counting it among the 17 mechanically resolved coordinates.
My best guess is that an original 8 or 8s became 85 somewhere during copying or typesetting. Multiple public copies preserve the same printed 85, so Barney’s original or a contemporary retained copy is needed to settle it. His undigitized letterbook is catalogued as NARA RG 45, Entry I-18 644, NAID 1848146: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1848146
The mechanical output MAT + the clear letter “a” + MORASS joins as MATAMORASS. This appears to be a phonetic construction for Matamoras/Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Texas. An 1850 spelling book divides the name as MAT A MO RAS, and an 1851 geography poem book prints MAT-A-MO-RAS: https://archive.org/details/primaryschoolspe00swanrich/page/n82/mode/1up and https://archive.org/details/poeticalgeograph00vanwrich/page/n30/mode/1up
(Side note: I love this so much because who doesn’t love a lil-silly-poem-in-a-centuries-old-book detour about a now obscure place that is somehow super relevant in cracking this centuries old cipher, all because the folks at Google and Harvard and a gazillion other archivists nerds decided it was worth saving)
I regard that place-name as a persuasive interpretation of two keyed fragments plus the printed letter “a,” not as another independently keyed word.
The earlier discussion that got partway there is here: https://civilwartalk.com/threads/confederate-naval-cipher.78858/
——————————————————————————————
As far as I have been able to determine, this is the first public reading of the complete report since it appeared in cipher in the Official Records.
I would be very interested in corrections or similar ciphers, thank you for reading!
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Realtime for upcoming games: cupcharts.com
Free realtime website: https://cupcharts.com
Methodology and code here
reddit’s automated safety filters won’t let me post the full set but if ur curious about pictures from a local fight club see here https://www.instagram.com/p/DaVzmnACYB1/